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Photo Light Box: February



I just renewed my interest in learning illustrator as I thought it would go nicely with whatever skills I already have with photoshop. The tutorial I saved on my hard drive is about making shiny marbles or balls. So, I thought I’ll just publish a photo light box feature of some of the work I did after following the tutorial. It’s really not something that would dazzle anyone but it’s cool to see the first time.

February being the month of love (well, Valentine’s day happens to fall on this month, though any month would do), here’s what I came up with using the technique discussed in the illustrator tutorial I downloaded. I created the basic shapes in Illustrator and just exported it to photoshop to apply the finish I desired.

I also dabbled a bit on how my blog’s logo would look inside a shiny ball. Uhmmm, still can’t say if it would look good.

I hope my enthusiasm for learning illustrator would hold even after this first output. I have a variety of interests but I can’t stay focused on one long enough to really make something worthwhile before the next thing gets my attention. Attention deficit? More like impatience. Illustrator just happens to have a slightly steeper learning curve than photoshop I suppose. Thus, after an hour of tinkering with it, I can only show some pathetic excuse for a digital art. But I guess the time wasted was a lot more enjoyable than the same amount of time miserably failing at coming up with an idea for something to write about for my next post. Anyway, I hope to learn enough of illustrator to be able to come up with art like collisiontheory’s. It’s when I bumped into his work sometime ago that actually inspired me to learn illustrator in the first place. And then maybe later on, I could also earn a little with this skill, the way he did with his.

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February’s First Post

Track Cell Phone

I’ve already written a post called ‘track cell phone‘. I’ve elaborated in it the ways one can locate cell phone or track lost cell phone numbers. I’ve even given a link to a world tracker site that track verizon cell phone… an online (sprint) cell phone tracker.


Adsense Section Targeting

Alright, the block of text above is an experiment to check the effectiveness of adsense targeting codes. I’ve long wandered how some sites are able to conjure the right adsense ads even in a page that contains a chaos of different topics. There’s even a page I saw that has only a title and nothing else below it except an adsense block that surprisingly drew ads that was centered according to the title’s context inspite of other printed text contained in the other elements of the page, e.g., in the sidebar, footer, etc.

[tip]

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
...Block of Text...
<!-- google_ad_section_end


[/tip]

I have enclosed the ‘track cell phone‘ title & paragraphs above in these adsense targeting codes. I’ve heard conflicting reports about the effectiveness of adsense targeting. One report also said that sometimes it takes google days or weeks to adjust its output after first encountering the targeting codes in a post. If the adsense codes I’ve written in this post works, then the adsense ads above should soon only show ads related to cell phone tracking.

February

This is my first post for February. Regarding my goal of writing more posts for this blog, I’ve so far managed to fulfill the promise I made last sometime ago in ‘Best of 2009‘ where I vowed to write at least 8 posts per month. From here, I hope to increase my monthly output of posts. Happy February, folks! Happy Valentines in advance!